The Kitchen Table

If I’m ever on Death Row, I want my last meal brought in from Cotham’s Mercantile.

Cotham’s is a café on Highway 161 in Scott, Arkansas, about thirty minutes south of Little Rock.  Geoff and I discovered it at the tail end of our Christmas road trip on our way back to New Mexico from Asheville (his mom) and Atlanta (my parents.)I wish we’d discovered it on our way east, because then we could have eaten there twice.   It’s that good.

Once upon a time, long, long ago (so long ago that I was a sophomore in college) I was home for winter break—then known quaintly as Christmas vacation—when I found a recipe for pumpkin cookies in Glamour Magazine…of all unlikely places.  It was just a tiny sidebar, sandwiched between articles on what to wear to holiday parties and the latest hairstyles, but the cookies sounded so good…I dashed to the grocery store to buy the ingredients, commandeered my mother’s kitchen and whipped up a batch.

Yesterday I read a blog post by my friend Kathy MacDonald who lives near Vancouver, BC.  Kathy was recently diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, and her doctor thought she might want to start a blog as a way of sorting out her thoughts and feelings about this news.  She’s a neat woman, a good writer and she has a wicked wit, and as I read her latest post about having to give up her car, I started thinking about (among other things) my cars past and present.

My favorite book of 2011…yes, I know the year’s not over yet, but I’m pretty sure nothing I read in the next three months is going to top Aftertaste  by Meredith Mileti.  Page-turning story, exquisitely crafted prose, characters you want to meet…and of course, FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD!  But instead of me going on about how much I love this novel (both times I read it) I thought I’d let the author speak for herself, so here is my interview with Meredith Mileti:

Meredith Mileti

1.    The dictionary defines Aftertaste as “what is left at the end.”  How did you choose the title and what does it mean to you?

Lois Gilbert

My friend Lois Gilbert is a woman of many talents.  Possessor of a BFA in drawing and fine art, she made a living for many years doing photo-realistic art.  Then she decided she wanted to write books, so she published four novels, including her latest, Lost in the Gila, a kick-ass mystery starring a female archeologist.

After the modest success of Lost, Lois decided that while she enjoyed writing, she really didn’t like publishing and all the self-promotion it entailed.  She has a flair for shaping other people’s stories, so for a while she worked as a hired gun (that’s writer talk for someone who helps you whip your manuscript into shape so you can hopefully sell it to a major publisher.)  She also had a highly successful gig as a ghost writer.

The setup: four friends, two cabins on a rushing river, lots of good food and wine.

I’ve known Anne Henderson Browning (AKA Roonie) since fall of 1964 when we became part of a small, select group of bad girls intent on having maximum fun with minimum work at our small, Southern Baptist university.

Our main interests then were boys, cutting chapel, smuggling cheap wine into the dorm and sneaking out after curfew.  But these days most of our conversations involve more staid topics—books, movies, travel, food and wine.  For several years she and her husband Steve have been telling Geoff and me about a place called The Cabins at Bear Creek about 30 miles northeast of Dolores, CO and finally we arranged a rendezvous there.

As a native Californian who graduated from high school in L.A., I have a sort of love/hate relationship with the place.  I feel no compunction about criticizing it and laughing at some of the more insane aspects of life here while at the same time hotly defending it against “outsiders.”

I tend to think of California as a beautiful woman who’s been abused and exploited till she’s become coarse and vulgar.  But just when I’m about to turn my back on her and walk away, I catch a glimpse of her still formidable beauty and brilliance or maybe she just has a good laugh at her own expense and my loyalty flares up fiercely.

Can you stand one more post about New Zealand?

It’s been two weeks since we got home.  The first week was spent walking around in a fog, alternating between sleeping for twelve hours without changing position and not sleeping at all.  That and doing laundry and answering email.

The second week was more normal, although it’s still hard to get out of bed in the morning.  I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time on the photos—sorting, editing, adding captions, putting them in chronological order, checking spellings, uploading, posting.  We ended up

Murray and Sue

Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, have many legends, including the creation of New Zealand.  They tell how the god Maui pulled from the ocean a huge fish which became the North Island, and his canoe became the South Island.  There’s the story of the walking mountains, volcanoes on the North Island—Tongariro and Taranaki—rivals for the hand of the beautiful mountain Pihanga.

You don’t want to keep making comparisons, but really, you can’t help it.

When I was in New Zealand in 1979, the country was just creeping into the twentieth century.  This time it’s full bore ahead into the twenty-first.  That’s the good news and the bad news.

In the plus column…there are lots of coffee houses.  Here, a “flat white” is like a latte and a “long black” is what we call an Americano.  Many places don’t seem to bother with plain drip coffee anymore, which is fine with me, and those that do mostly use the French press, which is also good.